Uninstalled an EP, lost entire memory?

[Simulation]

I'm actually more okay with it than I thought I would've been. xD But it was still pretty confusing how this happened. I installed Pets yesterday. When I decided it was taking up too much memory, I uninstalled it. I didn't even make any pets or use any pet-exclusives. Anyone know how the heck that happened and if it's possible to get that memory back?

[BeosBoxBoy]

what do you mean by "memory"?

[Simulation]

what do you mean by "memory"?

Oh! I'm sorry I wasn't clear! I mean all of my Sims, the Sims in my Body Shop, the Lots, and the custom neighborhoods, etc.

[BeosBoxBoy]

Unfortunately for us all, EA in its infinite wisdom has designed the un-install of every EP and SP to wipe-out the user folders (Downloads, Projects, SavedSims, etc.)  The only way you can restore these is if you knew to back-up before hand.  

There is a reason that some things should be deleted, even if you didn't make any changes, when you install any of the expansion packs or stuff packs, significant changes can be made to the neighbourhoods you have save.  In particular, the lots; you might not believe how complicates the lot files are.  Just the roofing alone is a dreadful thing to behold in SimPE.  Even if you don't use one of the round roofings, a new layer is added so you can.  Then there are things like the in-ground pools.  The addition of the ability to make diagonal or rounded pools made huge changes to the ground layer.  Pets in particular (in the absence of a mod to prevent this) adds ten or so hidden pets as strays per lot.  You don't see them until the game needs to annoy you with them.

Pets EP supports the use of a combined residential + community collection file, so the collections folder being deleted I understand.

SavedSims you might have made a pet (even though you didn't) so the paranoid hall-monitors at EA decided it was best the SavedSims folder go bye-bye.

Then we have to consider Sims.  The sims each have memories and relations, and in the process of adding pets to the game, a new list of potential memories and way to relate to animals were added to the sims's save files.  So when you are un-installing an expansion pack, it isn't altogether bad that the neighbourhoods get pitched.  The rest seems overly paranoid and malicious to delete, but that's me.

[JCSpencer]

As far as I can tell, you're stuff is completely gone, short of using a recovery service. I don't fully understand the difference between a program deleting a file and me deleting a file. I know in the latter case, it only removes file identifiers, but the file is technically still there until you save something else to your hard drive - which is why some programs (and the FBI :devill:) can recover deleted files. It will probably cost you more time and effort than it is worth, but then only you can be the judge of the worth. I'd get the mourning out of the way now.

R.I.P. Simulation's Sims.